vonnieda

I was in Vegas in August for Def-Con and there was a ton of smoking. Our hotel’s casino/lobby was disgusting. The smokers area outside the convention was plenty busy. Walking to the monorail there were people outside most hotel back doors smoking.

Which reminds me: Also, the smoking area of every airport I’ve been to in the last 2 years has been thick with smokers.

I know it’s better than the 80s. I was there. But I don’t think it’s rare in the US at all.

In my daily life, every day, I am behind cars with people smoking, see people on their smoke breaks outside the doors of offices and retail, walk behind people on the sidewalk smoking, and see it on basically every job site I pass.

I only bring this up because I keeping seeing people say it's "rare" in the US, but is something rare if you run into multiple times every single day?

Can you say where in the US you find it rare to see smoking in public? I live in Kansas City and have been in Vegas, Seattle, and NYC recently and there is plenty of smoking everywhere. Less than the 80s, sure, but certainly not rare.

Asshole.

I think about this increasingly often. I have accomplished much, and have seen much of the world. I have also lived through gruesome deaths in my family and have seen how aging in America, under American healthcare looks.

I retired in 2023, not because I could, but because I couldn't not. I'm almost 50. My parents died in their early 60s. I have some of their health problems, and some of my own. I also destroyed my back in a motorcycle accident many years ago and live with constant pain.

My favorite things to do, which bring my peace and joy, involve me sitting in a chair, which hurts my back. In my youth I rode my bicycle avidly, which now hurts my back. I love gardening, and if I do it too much, it hurts my back.

It became increasingly clear to me that my "purpose" in this country is to work until I die. I know that there are other countries, and other kinds of lives, but they are not where my wife and friends and life are.

I am happy, relatively healthy, and love life. I would like to live forever if I could. I know I could fill every minute of it with things I find interesting, even if it was just reading every single book.

But I've seen what American life looks like in your 60s and older, and it's not fucking pretty for most people.

I vibe coded an ebook reader in Swift for iOS in an evening. I wanted something that stored my books and reads in a private s3 bucket, and gave me a simple interface for reading them. It syncs my books and reads across my devices. It only has the features I want, and I read in it every day.

If I posted it you would call it slop.

I made a cute little ESP32 flight radar for my desk. Two, actually, one for my wife. It shows the planes that fly over my house and has a little web interface I can use to set my position and a few other settings. It runs 24/7 and brings my joy to look at.

If I posted it you would call it slop.

I'm designing my first synthesizer / groovebox. It has 36 hall-effect keys and buttons, 7 rotary encoders, a beautiful monochrome blue OLED, audio and midi in and out, stereo microphones, SD sample streaming, and an audio engine that scales across multiple ESP32-S3 modules. I started the firmware by hand but quickly realized I could get everything I needed much faster with gentle prodding at Claude.

I've been working on it since January and have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it. I'm finishing up rev 2 of the PCB and I hope to one day sell a few.

When I post it, you will call it slop.

People are learning to keep their projects to themselves, because the Internet is full of assholes. Look at the comments already on this post. A large group of people have decided that AI does not work, whether it works or not.

It's hard to do, but ignore the trolls. This is a lesson we had to learn many years ago and it applies today. Do good things that you and others find interesting and ignore the trolls.

If he is 75 and still has to work to get by he has already been robbed of his livelihood. The average lifespan for males in the US is 76ish.

Maybe he just does it for the love of the game, but there are so many old, sick, people in pain who have to labor like this just to get by every day.

Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.

You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.

My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.

I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.

Psyched to see this! I've been working on my own similar thing that sucks and I don't want to - I want to write a local first music app that syncs across all my devices. This might get me there!

This feels a lot like what I've been wanting for sketching hardware ideas. Gonna spend some time with this. Nice work!

This is really clever and is taking a direction I hope to see more software taking! Totally self contained is awesome. Well done!

Try FreeCAD one more time, if you haven't tried 1.0+, and it might stick. I've finally, in the past 6 months moved all my work to FreeCAD and KiCad after trying both many times over the past decades.

I highly recommend watching one of MangoJelly's beginner videos for FreeCAD, even if you have CAD experience. It made it very clear how to adapt my Fusion360 skills.